Quotes About Melville

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville—the masters of the King's English all promoted the easy imagery of black as vile and white as purity and thereby fed a deep and potent racism that well served all who would enslave the black men of Africa.

The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.

Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his had and gloves.

Dewey was obsessed with efficiency. He even changed his name from "Melville" to "Melvil" as a time-saving gesture and briefly even changed his last name to "Dui.

Melville died in New York on September 28, 1891, blissfully unaware that, in the years to come, so many people would leave the hyphen out of 'Moby-Dick.

On July 25, 1943, the day Mussolini fell, I was with Luce trying to shake off his objection to a long essay I had written for Fortune's philosophy series on the vision of democracy according to Emerson, Melville, Whitman.

From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it.

I like to be near water whenever possible, don't you?" he said, gazing into the dark. "Melville put it best: 'Nothing will content men but the extremest limit of the land'—but that's not it, I can't recall the quote. It's in our nature to seek out the edge. Even on a golf course

Every book is an alchemical creation, and I'm thinking back to 1857 when Herman Melville arrived in Greece and saw the Parthenon for the first time sitting there like a great beached whale, its big white bones exposed to the winds. But how can this happen? How can a whale turn into a building? Or into a book? In what way can words be alive?

CVS Corporation, which in 1957 entered the S&P 500 Index as Melville Shoe Corp.,

I must revert again to the perpetual theme: in the criticism of Melville & Whitman, and even Poe, Lawrence revealed a magnificent force, an understanding beyond all criticism heretofore known. The roughness & simplicity, the apparent laziness of it is disarming. Underneath tho' a terrible power & penetration.)

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.

More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.'

What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

And the visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.